GeForce GTX 680 2 GB Review: Kepler Sends Tahiti On Vacation

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Enthusiasts want to know about Nvidia's next-generation architecture so badly that they broke into our content management system and took the data to be used for today's launch. Now we can really answer how Kepler fares against AMD's GCN architecture.

Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 (DX 11)

At 1680x1050 and 1920x1080, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 680 slides past the GeForce GTX 590 when anti-aliasing isn’t in the picture, though AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 is the fastest card of all with and without a combination of 4x MSAA/FXAA turned on. Nvidia’s new flagship holds its largest lead over the Radeon HD 7970 at lower resolutions. By the time we reach 2560x1600, it’s much smaller.

We received some feedback in our Radeon HD 7800-series launch story asking us to go back to Ultra quality settings, and that’s what we’re doing here. It’s pretty amazing that, late last year, we were having a tough time coming up with single-card configurations that’d handle this game at its highest detail options in Battlefield 3 Performance: 30+ Graphics Cards, Benchmarked. Now, almost any of these boards is suitable all the way up to 2560x1600 without AA turned on (though you could probably get away with FXAA, no sweat).

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
327 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Hail to the new king.
    Reply
  • borden5
    oh man this's good news for consumer, hope to see a price war soon
    Reply
  • johnners2981
    Damn prices, in europe we have to pay the equivalent of $650-$700 to get one
    Reply
  • outlw6669
    Nice results, this is how the transition to 28nm should be.
    Now we just need prices to start dropping, although significant drops will probably not come until the GK110 is released :/
    Reply
  • Finally we will see prices going down (either way :-) )
    Reply
  • Scotty99
    Its a midrange card, anyone who disagrees is plain wrong. Thats not to say its a bad card, what happened here is nvidia is so far ahead of AMD in tech that the mid range card purposed to fill the 560ti in the lineup actually competed with AMD's flagship. If you dont believe me that is fine, you will see in a couple months when the actual flagship comes out, the ones with the 384 bit interface.
    Reply
  • Chainzsaw
    Wow not too bad. Looks like the 680 is actually cheaper than the 7970 right now, about 50$, and generally beats the 7970, but obviously not at everything.

    Good going Nvidia...
    Reply
  • run the test on the same speeds then lets talk...
    Reply
  • SkyWalker1726
    AMD will certainly Drop the price of the 7xxx series
    Reply
  • rantoc
    2x of thoose ordered and will be delivered tomorrow, will be a nice geeky weekend for sure =)
    Reply